I.
Executive Summary

In this report, Human Rights Watch examines military
operations by Israeli and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon during the armed conflict
that lasted from July 12 until August 14, 2006. Human Rights Watch issued an
earlier report on the conflict, researched and published while the war was
ongoing. Because of our concerns about the conduct of that conflict by both
sides and the difficulty of doing research in the midst of the fighting, Human
Rights Watch conducted substantial additional research in the less difficult
post-war environment.

According to this new research, the conflict resulted in at
least 1,109 Lebanese deaths, the vast majority of whom were civilians, 4,399
injured, and an estimated 1 million displaced. Hezbollah's indiscriminate
rocket attacks on Israel,
the subject of a separate Human Rights Watch report, Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah's Rocket Attacks on Israel during
the 2006 War, resulted in the deaths of 43 Israeli civilians and 12 Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, as well as the wounding of hundreds of Israeli
civilians.

Israeli warplanes launched some 7,000 bomb and missile
strikes in Lebanon,
which were supplemented by numerous artillery attacks and naval bombardment.[1] Israeli
airstrikes destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes. In some villages,
homes completely destroyed by Israeli forces numbered in the hundreds: 340
homes completely destroyed in Srifa; 215 homes completely destroyed in
Siddiquine; 180 homes completely destroyed in Yatar; 160 homes completely
destroyed in Zebqine; more than 750 homes completely destroyed in `Aita
al-Sha`ab; more than 800 homes completely destroyed in Bint Jbeil; and 140
homes completely destroyed in Taibe. The list throughout southern Lebanon
is extensive.

This report seeks to answer three central
questions:

Were
the Lebanese who died in Israeli air strikes civilians or combatants?;

Did
Israel abide by
international humanitarian law (the laws of war) in its attacks in Lebanon?;
and,

To
what extent did Hezbollah's actions contribute to the civilian death toll
inside Lebanon?

To answer these three questions, Human Rights Watch investigated
over 94 separate incidents of IDF air, artillery, and ground attacks that
claimed 510 civilian lives and those of 51 Hezbollah combatants, or almost half
of the Lebanese deaths in the conflict.

Our research shows that the primary reason for the high
Lebanese civilian death toll was Israel's frequent failure to abide
by a fundamental obligation of the laws of war: the duty to distinguish between
military targets, which can be legitimately attacked, and civilians, who are
not subject to attack. This was compounded by Israel's failure to take adequate
safeguards to prevent civilian casualties.

The occurrence of civilian casualties does not necessarily
mean that there has been a violation of international humanitarian law, but it
is a starting point for investigations. Human Rights Watch's extensive field
investigations in Lebanon
found that Israel
often attacked targets that, under the laws of war, could not be considered
military objectives subject to attack. In cases where a legitimate military
objective was evident, our investigations frequently found that the civilian
loss incurred may have been excessive compared to the anticipated military gain
from the attack. In critical respects, Israel conducted the war with
reckless indifference to the fate of Lebanese civilians and violated the laws
of war.

Israeli officials contend that the reason for the high
fatality rate was not indiscriminate targeting by Israeli forces, but the
Hezbollah military's allegedly routine practice of hiding among civilians and
using them as "shields" in the fighting. If Israeli attacks on Hezbollah forces
also killed civilians and destroyed civilian homes, Israeli officials have
argued, the blame lies with Hezbollah. The evidence Human Rights Watch
uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes this argument.

Hezbollah at times violated the laws of war in its
deployment of forces in Lebanon.
It also frequently violated the laws of war in its rocket attacks on Israel,
which is the subject of a separate Human Rights Watch report, Civilians under Assault. On some
occasions, our research shows, Hezbollah fired rockets from within populated
areas, allowed its combatants to mix with the Lebanese civilian population, or
stored weapons in populated civilian areas in ways that violated international
humanitarian law. Such violations, however, were not widespread:
we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers
and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that
in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas
as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of
its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages. On the
question of whether Hezbollah intentionally used civilians as "shields"-that
is, whether Hezbollah forces not only endangered civilians in violation of the
duty to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians the hazards of armed
conflict but also deliberately deployed among civilians with the aim of
protecting themselves from attack-a serious laws of war violation, we found a
handful of instances but nothing to suggest a widespread practice.

For the reasons set forth below, Human Rights Watch's
assessment of Hezbollah's practices does not support the Israeli contention
that Hezbollah violations were the principal cause of Lebanese civilian
casualties. Responsibility for the high civilian death toll of the war in Lebanon
lies squarely with Israeli policies and targeting decisions in the conduct of
its military operations.

Israeli Policies Contributing to the Civilian Death
Toll

In the vast majority of cases documented in this report,
Israeli air strikes hit near or on civilian objects, killing numerous civilians
in their homes or vehicles. While there were instances in which civilian deaths
were "collateral damage" from legitimate attacks on military targets, during
the vast majority of the deadly air strikes we investigated, we found no
evidence of Hezbollah military presence, weaponry or any other military objective
that would have justified the strike. Human Rights Watch visits to the
graveyards in the villages found that the victims of these strikes were buried
as civilians, and not honored as "fighters" or "martyrs" by Hezbollah or other
militant groups, despite the pride that Hezbollah takes in these labels. Women
and children account for a large majority of the victims of Israeli air strikes
that we documented. Out of the 499 Lebanese civilian casualties of whom Human
Rights Watch was able to confirm the age and gender, 302 were women or
children.

This repeated failure to distinguish between civilians and
combatants cannot be explained as mere mismanagement of the war or a collection
of mistakes. Our case studies show that Israeli policy was primarily responsible
for this deadly failure. Israel assumed
that all Lebanese civilians had observed its warnings to evacuate villages
south of the Litani River, and thus that anyone who remained was a combatant.
Reflecting that assumption, it labeled any visible person, or movement of
persons or vehicles south of the LitaniRiver or in the Beka`
Valley as a Hezbollah military operation which could be targeted. Similarly, it
carried out widespread bombardment of southern Lebanon, including the massive use
of cluster munitions prior to the expected ceasefire, in a manner that did not
discriminate between military objectives and civilians.

During the war, Israel
repeatedly sent warnings to the population in southern Lebanon to evacuate the area south of the LitaniRiver.
It issued such warnings by Arabic-language flyers dropped from airplanes,
Arabic radio messages broadcast into southern Lebanon, recorded voice messages
sent to some Lebanese cellphones, and loudspeakers along the Israel-Lebanese
border. Following the release of the messages, many Israeli officials made
statements (see below) suggesting that everyone who remained behind was linked
to Hezbollah, and therefore a legitimate target of attack. In subsequent days
and weeks, Israel
intensified its bombardment of southern Lebanon, hitting thousands of homes
in the south.

It is questionable whether Israeli officials really believed
the assumption that there were no Lebanese civilians left in southern Lebanon,
or simply announced this to defend their actions. Certainly, there is evidence
to suggest that Israeli officials knew that their assumption was erroneous. At
the time of the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, stories about Lebanese
civilians dying in Israeli strikes or trapped in southern Lebanon filled the Israeli
and international media. In addition, foreign embassies were in regular contact
with Israeli diplomats to request assistance with the evacuation of their
nationals caught in the fighting in the south. And in some instances, Israel
seemed to know exactly how many people remained in a village. For instance, on
July 24, Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, estimated that 500 residents
remained in Bint Jbeil despite IDF warnings to leave.[2]

In addition, Israel
must have known from its past conflicts in southern Lebanon that a civilian population
is rarely willing or able to leave its homes according to timetables laid down
by a belligerent military force.[3] Reporting
10 years ago on fighting between Hezbollah and Israel during July 1993, Human
Rights Watch found that it was "reasonably foreseeable that a segment of the
population might not flee, and it was entirely foreseeable that in particular
the old and indigent would not be able to evacuate their homes, especially
considering the brevity of time between the first warnings and the beginning of
the shelling."[4] As in
1993, many elderly and indigent people were among the casualties in the 2006
war. Israel
should have known that significant numbers of civilians would remain in their
villages throughout the war. At the very least, Israeli forces had a duty to
check the areas they were targeting, especially after it became clear that
civilians were dying in very high numbers.

Even if those who remained did so out of support for
Hezbollah-a claim that Human Rights Watch's research disproves, as most who
remained behind stayed because they were too old, poor, or sickly to
leave-Israel would not have been justified in attacking them. The political
leanings of the civilian population in a given area or village is irrelevant as
far as their civilian status is concerned. To the extent that civilians do not
directly participate in hostilities, that is, are not committing acts that by
their nature or purpose are likely to contribute to harming the personnel and
equipment of the enemy, they continue to benefit from the protection afforded
by their civilian status under international humanitarian law. Thus attacks
directed against civilians who support Hezbollah only politically are just as
unlawful as other direct attacks against civilians.

Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war
with criminal intent are responsible for war crimes. A criminal investigation
of such attacks would need to determine if those responsible attacked areas
where civilians remained knowingly or recklessly. That is, a commander who knew
that the assumption that all the civilians had left an area was not true but
still targeted that area indiscriminately would be criminally responsible for
ordering an unlawful attack.

Throughout the conflict, Israeli warplanes targeted civilian
vehicles on roads and homes, apparently assuming them to be Hezbollah military
movements. Among the deadly attacks on civilians trying to flee the conflict
are the killing of 23 civilians, including 14 children and seven women, fleeing
from Marwahin on July 15; the killing of six and wounding of eight civilians
fleeing from `Aitaroun on July 19; the killing of three and wounding of 14
civilians fleeing from al-Tiri on July 23; the killing of 2 and wounding of
four civilians fleeing from Mansouri on July 23; the wounding of nine civilians
fleeing from Mansouri on July 23; the wounding of six ambulance drivers and
three passengers in Qana on July 23; the killing of one civilian on a
motorcycle on his way to buy food and medicines on July 24; the killing of
seven civilians fleeing from Marja`youn on August 11; and the killing of seven
and wounding of six civilians in the Beka` Valley on August 14. In all these
cases, there is no evidence of a Hezbollah military presence that would justify
the attacks.

A simple movement of persons or vehicles was often enough to
cause a deadly air strike. On July 19, Israeli air strikes killed four members
of the Darwish family in `Ainata, almost immediately after the civilians
returned in a taxi to their homes after buying and distributing bread in the
village. On August 4, an Israeli strike on a remote fruit farm in al-Qa` in the
northern Beka` Valley resulted in the deaths of 25 Syrian Kurdish farm workers.
Apparently, the IDF spotted a refrigerated truck leaving the farm shortly
before the attack and fired at the farm buildings before confirming whether or
not they were a legitimate military target. On August 7, an Israeli air strike
killed five civilians in Insar, after relatives and neighbors had gathered in
the home to socialize and then left the home at the end of the evening. On July
25, an Israeli drone fired a missile at Sa`da Nur al-Din in al-Ghassaniyeh,
after she had gone to her home to collect food supplies and was driving back to
the village shelter where she had been living with some 40 other civilians. On
August 10, Israeli warplanes struck a home in Rabb al-Talatine, killing four
women, soon after the women had moved a wounded relative (one of the four women
killed in the attack) from one home to another.

The nature of Israel's
bombing campaign in southern Lebanon
belies Israel's
argument that it had direct evidence linking particular targets to Hezbollah
forces before striking them. Human Rights Watch's field investigations found
that in many instances there was no apparent military objective in villages hit
by Israeli attacks. But even where valid military targets existed somewhere in
the vicinity, the humanitarian law prohibition against indiscriminate attacks prohibits
a warring party from treating a town or village as a single military objective
subject to general bombardment. That is, the mere presence of Hezbollah forces
somewhere in a village or town would not justify the wholesale destruction of
villages and towns meted out by the IDF. Nor may attacks be carried out that
would be expected to cause disproportionate harm to the civilian population.

Compounding the problem, Israel targeted people or structures associated in any way with
Hezbollah's military, political, or social structures-regardless of whether
they constituted valid military objectives in accordance with international
humanitarian law-and failed to take all necessary precautions to avoid civilian
casualties when attacking suspected Hezbollah targets.

During the war, Israeli officials repeatedly stated that
they considered all parts of Hezbollah-its military wing as well as its
extensive political, social, and welfare branches-to be part of an integrated
terror organization, and designated any person or office associated with
Hezbollah to be legitimate military targets. Israel's UN ambassador, Dan
Gillerman, told the UN Security Council on July 21 that Hezbollah was a
"cancer" that "must be removed without a trace," and rejected any distinction
between Hezbollah's military and political structures, stating that "[t]he
[Hezbollah] member of parliament and the terrorist in the hills launching
rockets at Israeli civilians both have the same strategy and goal. These labels
cannot be allowed to give legitimacy to a gang of thugs[5]."

The apparent decision to target virtually all aspects of
Hezbollah's membership and infrastructure led to the deaths of some civilians
who were unconnected to Hezbollah, as well as Hezbollah members who were not
engaged in military operations. An attack that knowingly and deliberately
targeted people who were neither combatants nor civilians directly
participating in the hostilities would be a serious violation of the laws of
war. Insofar as the attack is launched knowing that the target should be
treated as a civilian under international humanitarian law, those responsible
would have committed a war crime.

Human Rights Watch research indicates that a large number of
private homes of civilian Hezbollah members were targeted during the war, as
well as a variety of civilian Hezbollah institutions such as schools, welfare
agencies, banks, shops, and political offices, in addition to Hezbollah
military infrastructure and the homes of Hezbollah combatants. The civilian
death toll from such strikes is low, because almost all Hezbollah officials and
members, and often even their neighbors, evacuated their homes in anticipation
of Israeli air strikes. However, Human Rights Watch did document a number of
cases in which civilians were killed during air strikes on civilian
Hezbollah-affiliated targets during the war. For example, on July 13, the first
day of massive air strikes, Israeli warplanes destroyed the home of Shaikh
`Adil Muhammad Akash, an Iranian-educated Shi`a cleric believed to have a
religious affiliation with Hezbollah, killing him, his wife, and his 10
children aged between two months and 18 years, and their Sri Lankan maid. There
is no evidence (and the IDF has not publicly alleged) that Shaikh Akash was
involved in Hezbollah military activities, and according to villagers he was only
a religious leader in Dweir village. On July 23, an Israeli warplane fired at
the Nabi Sheet home of Dr. Fayez Shukr, a leading member of the Lebanese Ba`ath
Party and a political ally of Hezbollah, killing his 71-year-old father.

Israel's
broad definition of legitimate Hezbollah targets is particularly evident in the
pattern of attacks on the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, the neighborhood
of Dahieh. In their attacks on this largely Shi`a district of high-rise
apartment buildings, Israeli forces attacked not only Hezbollah military
targets but also the offices of Hezbollah's charitable organizations, the
offices of its parliamentarians, its research center, and multi-story residential
apartment buildings in areas considered supportive of Hezbollah. Statements by
Israeli officials strongly suggest that the massive IDF attacks in southern Beirut were carried out
not against Hezbollah military targets, as required by the laws of war, but
rather against entire neighborhoods because they were seen as pro-Hezbollah.
Some statements by Israeli officials, including Israel's
Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, suggest
that some of the attacks on southern Beirut may
have been unlawful retaliation for Hezbollah attacks against Israel.

In many cases in which civilian deaths did occur as Israel
attempted to target civilian (or even military) Hezbollah officials, the main
reason for the deaths was Israel's use of unreliable or dated intelligence that
led to the misidentification of a particular building as Hezbollah-related, or
Israel's failure to take adequate precautions to limit civilian casualties
during strikes on presumed Hezbollah targets, particularly the homes of
suspected Hezbollah militants.

On July 13, several Israeli missiles struck the home of
43-year-old Mustafa Khashab, killing him, his wife, his father, his sister, and
two children aged 14 and 16. Mustafa had no links to Hezbollah and had permanently
settled in Germany; it is possible that the strike attempted to target his
brother, Safi Khashab, a high-ranking Hezbollah official, who had left the
village the evening prior to the strike and did not live in the targeted home.
A similar example of failed targeting of Hezbollah's members that led to
civilian deaths is the Israeli attack on the town of al-Ghaziyeh on August 7
and 8, resulting in the deaths of 26 civilians. The apparent target of the
al-Ghaziyeh attacks was a Hezbollah leader from the town, Amin Khalifa, as
Israeli bombs struck his neighbor's home and the shops and homes of his
brothers. By all indications, Amin Khalifa was not in al-Ghaziyeh during the
war, including on the days the attacks took place.

Flawed intelligence and communication breakdowns contributed
to many other cases of mistaken targeting by the IDF that resulted in civilian
casualties. On July 16, an Israeli air strike on a multistory apartment
building in Tyre killed 14 civilians, but the
building was not the "Tyre Hezbollah headquarters" claimed by Israeli
intelligence; it was the headquarters of Lebanon's
Civil Defense offices in Tyre,
an institution protected under humanitarian law. On July 25, an Israeli
precision guided missile demolished an observer post of the UN's Observer Group
Lebanon (OGL) outside Khiam, killing four UN observers, after UN officials had
repeatedly been in contact with the IDF to warn them that they were firing
close to a UN position. Although this report documents many cases in which
Hezbollah fighters wrongfully fired from nearby UN positions, Hezbollah was not
present near the Khiam UN position when an Israeli missile struck it. On the
last day of the war, August 13, Israeli warplanes mounted one of the largest
strikes of the war on the Imam Hassan Building Complex in the Rweiss
neighborhood of southern Beirut, destroying eight ten-story buildings and
killing at least 36 civilians and four low-ranking Hezbollah members,
apparently acting on an inaccurate tip (see below) that a high-ranking Hezbollah
official was staying at the complex.

* * *

Israel
made extensive use of cluster munitions during the armed conflict in Lebanon.[6] As
documented in a forthcoming Human Rights Watch report on Israel's use of cluster munitions in Lebanon, IDF cluster munitions struck wide
swathes of southern Lebanon,
particularly during the last three days of the conflict when both sides knew a
settlement was imminent. The IDF has stated that it mostly fired cluster
munitions at military objectives in open areas, and only fired near built-up
areas "toward particular locations from which [Hezbollah] missiles were being
launched against Israel,
and after significant measures were taken to warn civilians to leave the area."[7] Human
Rights Watch's field research in Lebanon showed that the Israeli
military launched many of its cluster munition attacks at or near towns and
villages, in some cases against Hezbollah forces, but in many other cases with
no evident military objective.

The manner in which the IDF used cluster munitions and its
reliance on antiquated munitions (many from the Vietnam war era) resulted in
estimated failure rates of between 30 and 40 percent for many submunitions.
This left as many as one million hazardous unexploded submunitions that
littered fields and orchards and dozens of towns and villages in south Lebanon,
threatening the returning civilian population.[8]As of June 20, 2007, the explosion of cluster munition duds since the
ceasefire had killed 24 civilians and injured 183.[9]
They have severely damaged the region's economy by turning agricultural land
into minefields and interfering with the harvesting of tobacco, citrus, banana,
and olive crops.

* * *

This report deals mostly with investigations of civilian
deaths caused by aerial bombardment. However, in the course of our
investigations we also documented two troubling cases in which Israeli ground
troops killed unarmed Lebanese civilians who the soldiers should have seen
posed no threat. On August 6, Israeli ground troops shot dead an elderly couple
from the Nasrallah family (unrelated to the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan
Nasrallah), aged 81 and 83, and their son and daughter, aged 54 and 58, as they
came to check on their home in Taibe, which, unbeknownst to them, Israeli
soldiers had occupied. On July 27, Israeli soldiers shot dead 36-year-old
Maryam Khanafer as she was walking away from her home, which Israeli soldiers
had occupied, holding her daughter's portable toilet. While these two cases of
killings do not appear to be the result of any policy decision by Israeli
officials, the circumstances of these killings merit investigation and, if
appropriate, prosecution.

* * *

The Israeli policies summarized above guided IDF military
operations in Lebanon
during the conflict. That they reflect Israeli policy and not just the behavior
of individual IDF members is evident from statements by Israeli government
officials and military leaders that Israeli forces intentionally blurred the
distinction between civilian and combatant. In one such statement issued on
July 27, 2006, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said that "all those now in
south Lebanon
are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah."[10]
IDF spokesperson Jacob Dallal told the Associated
Press:

[Hezbollah] is a terrorist institution, a terrorist
organization that has to be debilitated and crippled as much as possible and
that means [destroying] its infrastructure, that means its television, its
institutions . In the war on terror in general, it's not just about hitting an
army base, which they don't have, or a bunker. It is also about undermining
their ability to operate . That ranges from incitement on television and
radio, financial institutions and, of course, other grass-roots institutions
that breed more followers, more terrorists, training bases, obviously, schools.[11]

In this context, Israel's claim that it only
attacked military targets rings hollow.

The policies on the conduct of the war had a common element
in that Israel
sought to define a broad swath of civilians and civilian objects as military
objectives. Israeli officials and commanders ostensibly recognized the
humanitarian law requirement that they could target only military objectives
but then unlawfully widened the scope of what they considered a legitimate
military target. In doing so they conducted numerous attacks that were
indiscriminate, disproportionate, and otherwise unjustified. Such attacks are
serious violations of international humanitarian law. To the extent such
attacks were conducted with knowledge or reckless indifference to the civilian
nature of those being attacked, then those who ordered these attacks would have
the criminal intent needed for the commission of war crimes as defined by
international humanitarian law. And to the extent that senior commanders or
officials knew or should have known that war crimes were being committed, and
were in a position of authority to stop the attacks or punish those responsible
and did not do so, they would be responsible for war crimes as a matter of
command responsibility under international humanitarian law.[12]

Hezbollah Conduct During the War

Our research in Lebanon documented a number of
cases in which Hezbollah fighters placed weapons or ammunition inside civilian
homes or villages, as well as some cases in which Hezbollah fighters fired
rockets from densely populated areas.[13]
(Illustrative examples are detailed below.) Such conduct violates at minimum
the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.
Where Hezbollah combatants intended to use civilians to shield military assets
from attack, the requisite criminal intent would be present for the war crime
of shielding. However, as already noted, such practices were not nearly as
widespread as official Israeli government accounts and some independent press
accounts have suggested, and our research found that in all but a few of the
cases of civilian deaths we investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with
the civilian population or taken other actions to contribute to the targeting
of a particular home or vehicle by Israeli forces.

In a few cases, Hezbollah's illegal conduct led to civilian
deaths. For example, on July 13, an Israeli air strike destroyed two homes in
Bar`achit, killing Najib Hussain Farhat, 54, and his 16-year-old daughter Zainab.
Unbeknownst to the family, Hezbollah had built a large weapon storage facility
located in the unoccupied home next door, which was also destroyed in the
strike.

Similarly, on a number of occasions during the war,
Hezbollah forces fired rockets from populated civilian areas, triggering deadly
Israeli counterstrikes. On July 18, an Israeli air strike hit two civilian
homes in `Aitaroun, killing nine members of the `Awada family, approximately
two hours after villagers saw Hezbollah fighters firing rockets some 150 meters
from the home. A local villager in Yaroun, a mixed Christian-Sh`ia border
village, showed Human Rights Watch several places inside the village from where
Hezbollah had fired rockets, leading to massively destructive Israeli
counterstrikes.

In a case of Hezbollah's illegal conduct that led to the
death of only combatants, on July 16, an air strike on a home in Yatar killed
three Hezbollah fighters. The fighters had stored a recently fired rocket
launcher in the home. In like fashion, on July 13 in Marwahin, a mostly Sunni
village on the Lebanese-Israeli border, Hezbollah fighters drove a white van
packed with weapons into the village, parked it next to a mosque, and then
stored weapons and rockets in the home of a local civilian. Two days later,
witnesses spotted Hezbollah fighters in the village moving weapons hidden under
blankets.

Human Rights Watch also obtained credible evidence that
Hezbollah maintained weapons storage facilities in apartment buildings in
southern Beirut
and used civilians to move some of those weapons to different locations,
including at least one civilian shelter in an apartment building.

Hezbollah also fired from the vicinity of United Nations
outposts on an almost daily basis. This often led to Israeli counterstrikes
that resulted in death and injury to UN personnel. For observation purposes,
the UN outposts tended to located on the top of hills, which also happen to be
good positions from Hezbollah's military perspective to fire at Israel.
However, insofar as Hezbollah commanders or fighters chose those locations to
launch attacks because the proximity of UN personnel would make counterattack
difficult, which would constitute the war crime of shielding. That the motives
of Hezbollah combatants may have been mixed does not preclude criminality.
Further investigations are needed, including by the UN, to determine whether
Hezbollah forces acted unlawfully by purposefully using UN personnel as "human
shields" or by placing UN personnel at unnecessary risk by deploying in the
vicinity.

Commentators have cited the firing from near populated areas
to support allegations that Hezbollah routinely used civilians as "human
shields." International humanitarian law does not prohibit fighting in areas
where civilians are present or prohibit the presence of forces in such areas.
Armies have never been obliged to fight exposed out in the open. However,
international humanitarian law does require all parties to a conflict to take
all feasible precautions to protect civilians from the effects of combat.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) authoritative
Commentary on the Additional Protocols, several
state delegations to the diplomatic conference drafting the 1977 protocols to
the Geneva Conventions sought to define "everything feasible" as including "all
circumstances relevant to the success of military operations." But the ICRC
considered such a criterion to be "too broad":

There might be reason to fear that by invoking the success
of military operations in general, one might end up by neglecting the
humanitarian obligations prescribed here. Once again the interpretation will be
a matter of common sense and good faith.[14]

Parties to a conflict must avoid, to the extent feasible,
placing military objectives-personnel, equipment and weaponry-in densely
populated areas. As the ICRC Commentary notes,
"For example, a barracks or a store of military equipment or ammunition should
not be built in the middle of a town."[15]
Thus while using ammunition in a village during a firefight would be lawful
under humanitarian law (though the presence of ammunition would render a
location a legitimate target), the storage of ammunition inside a village would
not.

Parties must also, to the extent feasible, remove civilians
under their control from the vicinity of military objectives.[16] The ICRC Customary International Humanitarian Law states
that this obligation "is particularly relevant where military objectives can
not feasibly be separated from densely populated areas."[17]
Thus parties to a conflict seeking to deploy in populated areas should take
measures to ensure that civilians move to safer areas.

While failing to take precautions to protect civilians
violates humanitarian law, intentionally making use of civilians to render
military forces or a place immune from attack is considered to be the more
serious violation of "shielding." Because the definition of shielding
incorporates the concept of intent, any individual ordering shielding would
almost invariably be committing a war crime.

While we documented cases where Hezbollah stored weapons
inside civilian homes or fired rockets from inside populated areas, our
investigations to date suggest relatively few cases where Hezbollah might have
specifically intended to use the presence of civilians to shield itself from
counterattack-certainly not enough to constitute a widespread or systematic
pattern. One significant exception is Hezbollah's frequent firing of rockets
from the vicinity of UN outposts, where the evidence strongly suggests that one
of the two likely motives for doing so was to use the UN noncombatants to
shield Hezbollah from counterattack.

Even where Hezbollah endangered civilians by unlawfully
carrying out military operations in proximity to densely populated areas, Israel
was not justified under the laws of war in responding with disproportionate
attacks. International humanitarian law prohibits warring parties from
conducting attacks in which the expected civilian loss is disproportionate to the
anticipated military gain, even if the other party is committing violations of
the laws of war.

While the humanitarian law applicable during the Israeli
conflict with Hezbollah placed no obligation on those participating in the
hostilities to wear uniforms,[18] the
routine appearance of Hezbollah fighters in civilian clothes and their failure
to carry their weapons openly put the civilian population of Lebanon at risk.
Since Hezbollah fighters regularly appeared in civilian clothes, Israeli forces
would have had difficulty distinguishing between fighters and other male,
fighting-age civilians, and such difficulty increased the dangers of IDF
operations to the civilian population of Lebanon. However, the failure of
Hezbollah fighters to consistently distinguish themselves as combatants does
not relieve Israeli forces of their obligation to distinguish at all times
between combatants and civilians and to target only combatants.[19] That this
task may have been difficult at times does not negate the obligation. In cases
of doubt, a person must be considered a civilian and not a legitimate military
target.[20]

Summary of Methodology and Errors Corrected

This report builds on Human Rights Watch's August 2006
report, Fatal Strikes: Israel's
Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon. It represents the most
comprehensive study of civilian deaths in Lebanon to date, based on extensive
on-the-ground research. During the course of five months of continuous research
in Lebanon and Israel,
Human Rights Watch investigated the deaths of more than 561 persons during
Israeli air and groundstrikes and collected additional summary information
about an additional 548 deaths, thus accounting for a total number of 1,109
deaths (civilians and combatants) from the 34-day conflict. Human Rights Watch
interviewed more than 355 victims and witnesses of attacks in one-on-one
settings and collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups,
journalists, military experts, and government agencies. We visited more than
fifty villages and conducted on-site inspections. Human Rights Watch also
conducted research in Israel,
inspecting the IDF's use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with
IDF officials.

Human Rights Watch approached Israeli officials for
information on a number of occasions. Our researchers held several meetings
with officials in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the IDF, and the
Ministry of Justice. We also sent a letter on January 8, 2007 to then-Defense
Minister Amir Peretz requesting detailed information about the cases described
in this report, which is attached as an appendix to this report. Human Rights
Watch also talked to Israeli soldiers and officers to learn more about the
instructions the IDF gave to its soldiers and the precautions it took to avoid
civilian casualties.

This report does not address Israeli attacks on Lebanon's infrastructure, which have been
reported on elsewhere,[21] or Israel's
use of cluster munitions, which we will release a separate report on shortly.
It also does not address Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israel, which we also have reported on
separately, in Civilians under Assault:
Hezbollah's Rocket Attacks on Israel
during the 2006 War.

This report corrects two major and several minor
inaccuracies from Human Rights Watch's earlier report issued during the 2006
war (Fatal Strikes):

Further
Human Rights Watch investigations into a deadly strike at Srifa established
that an Israeli attack there killed 17 combatants and five civilians on July
19, not the 26 civilians claimed in Fatal Strikes.

In
a second case, involving an Israeli air strike on the village of `Aitaroun that
killed nine members of the `Awada family, further Human Rights Watch research
established that Hezbollah had fired rockets from near the home a few hours
before the deadly air strike, although there is no doubt that all of those
killed in the air strike were civilians unconnected to Hezbollah.

Human Rights Watch regrets these two major inaccuracies in
its Fatal Strikes report. We have corrected several smaller errors
relating to dates of strikes, ages and names of victims, and the previously
unreported presence of an empty Hezbollah civilian office in a building
targeted by an Israeli air strike in Bint Jbeil that killed two civilians.
Wherever we have corrected errors from previous reports, the text or footnotes
of this report clearly identify the information corrected.

To avoid any such mistakes in this report, we reexamined all
of the cases included in Fatal Strikes and conducted additional interviews,
site inspections, and visits to graveyards to establish whether victims were
civilians or combatants. In addition, we investigated a further 71 cases in
similar detail. Thus, our findings do not rely on any one piece of evidence or
witness testimony, but rather on multiple pieces of evidence that together
provide the information needed to verify the circumstances and victims of each
attack. Our findings in this report reconfirm the central conclusion of Fatal
Strikes: the primary victims of Israel's
bombardment of Lebanon
were Lebanese civilians, and they died primarily because of the indiscriminate
nature of Israeli attacks, not because of Hezbollah's practices.

[1]
Israeli authorities have not provided a total figure of their strikes against Lebanon.
According to the assessment of UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC),
Israeli aerial and ground strikes during the first weeks of the war used up to
3,000 bombs, rockets and artillery rounds daily, with the number rising to
6,000 towards the end of the war. See http://www.maccsl.org/War%202006.htm.

[4]
See Human Rights Watch, Civilian Pawns:
Law of War Violations and the Use of Weapons on the Israel-Lebanon Border
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), p. 92.

[5]
Statement by Ambassador Dan Gillerman, Israel's Permanent Representative to the
UN, during the open debate on "The Situation in the Middle East including the
Palestinian Question," UN Security Council, New York, July 21, 2006, U.N. doc.
S/PV.5493.

[8]
MACC SL, South Lebanon Cluster Bomb Info Sheet as at November 4, 2006, http://www.maccsl.org/reports/Leb%20UXO%20Fact%20Sheet%204%20November,%202006.pdf
(accessed March 18, 2007). As of June 5, 2007, MACC SL's contractors, United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) engineers, and the Lebanese Armed
Forces had cleared and destroyed more than 118,700 dud submunitions. MACC SL,
May 2007 Report of the MineActionCoordinationCenterSouth
Lebanon.

[12]
While the term "war crime" is colloquially used to mean any particularly
heinous laws of war violation by a person or warring party, Human Rights Watch
uses the term in its technical legal sense. A war crime is a serious violation
of certain rules of international humanitarian law committed with criminal
intent (that is, intentionally or recklessly) by an individual. War crimes are
enshrined in applicable treaties, such as the grave breaches provisions of the
1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols and the Rome Statute of
the International Criminal Court, and in customary international humanitarian
law.

[13]
Human Rights Watch has published a separate report on Hezbollah rocket attacks
on Israel in violation of
the humanitarian law prohibitions against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks
against civilians and civilian objects, titled Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah's Rocket Attacks on Israel
during the 2006 War.

[14]
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Commentary on the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 12
August 1949 (Geneva: Martinus
Nijhoff Publishers, 1987) pp. 681-82.

[16]
See Protocol Additional to the Geneva
Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of
International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) of 8 June 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 3,
entered into force December 7, 1978, article 58(a).

[18]
Article 44 of Protocol I provides that "to promote the protection of the
civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to
distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in
an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack." However, Israel is not a
party to Protocol I and article 44 is not considered reflective of customary
international law.